Iowans featured on "Modern Marvels" cable show

The History Channel program "Modern Marvels" will feature several Iowans on the episode scheduled to air tonight. The program bills itself as a celebration of ingenuity, invention and imagination. The topic of tonight’s show is corn.

Producers of "Modern Marvels" spoke with several corn experts at Iowa State University, including Roger Elmore. Elmore says he enjoyed being interviewed and was impressed with the questions the producers had prepared. Elmore, who is a corn specialist with ISU Extension, says the program will mostly focus on the wide range of uses for corn.

"It looks like they have some very good clips on sweet corn processing, some information on pharmaceuticals, and some clips from the milling and storage industries," Elmore said. "It looks like they even have a little snipit on corn cob pipes of all things." The program could just help reshape some viewers’ opinions about not only corn, but Iowa.

Elmore says, "Most of the world thinks of corn as just being simply corn, and not all the intricacies of it. Popcorn, for instance, how’s that different? Sweet corn…people always think that all the 13 or 14 million acres of corn here in Iowa is all sweet corn. It isn’t, it’s fuel corn, and there’s a distinct difference. So some of those differences I hope will be clearly exposed and discussed." " Modern Marvels " will air on the History Channel at 7 p.m. Iowa time.